The Next Wee While. Ages.

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To the best of my knowledge, I left off after meeting two Australians over a mutual gripe about 'Boris', the cacophonous, Eastern European babagenoush. This led to our moving hostels, from St Pancras to London Central. Somewhere I didn't realise at the I was about to get to know reasonably well. The move led to the reception girl placing us together for more or less the whole of their stay (them having actual plans of movement, adventure and exploration and me having very little idea of what was going on at all).

Then we got practical, we left to meet a friend they were travelling with who was staying at another hostel because of an administration error but who ended up crashing on the double bed (only one in the entire hostel) for most our time together. So now they were, whether or not they liked it, a four for the next week; James Donato, Chris "Digga" Di Grazia and Michael "Biff" Shafik; James, Digga and Biff - which apparently sounds closer to "Buff" in our native tongue. The three of them were from Melbourne and, after having met through various pathways, had put University off for a year in order to work and travel and take advantage of the eccentric and indulgent 1st world ritual of party travelling. We were on the exact same page from the get-go. These were my kind of people, they had just enough salt so that my skinny jeans and boots would fit in but they also had just enough down under in them to talk cars, drink piss and be fluent in grunt.

The next few days were a blurr of excitement, intoxication and a strange sense of familiarity. I remember clearly, however, that it all started in a fish and chip shop in Soho, with a beer that turned into four with comforting and effortless haste. This was to set the tone for the next week of this first encounter - the rhythm being set by the almost mandatory wind down and mong out every late morning to late afternoon to debrief and give James 'just five more minutes' to get up to take a shit or have a shower before the clock chimed beer o'clock and it was time to get right back to it.

We went on several pub crawls and scored some treats the first night just as the conversation turned toward the subject and stories were being swapped, as so often happens among we 'lost' and troubled youths.

One morning, being more a part of the evening before than yet having claim to it's recognition as an actual new day by us, James and I lit up some of these treats and walked around the grotesque wealth of the quiet central London streets amongst which we were living. We had realised, somewhere in the middle of million people streets and million dollar cars and million spying cctv cameras, that we were in London. Actual London. The town and streets you read about in history books and see on ads and in movies. Safe to say it was good shit, if a bit expensive.

On what could have been the same night, James had met some local talent from the University and after saying he had more Australian friends - to her giggled insistence that her friends love Aussies - it was time to go. I'd already got the message, or apparently thought I had, some time before which left me somewhere between Camden Town and Great Portland Station area (it may as well be Timaru to Dunedin, only with wasy more buildings). James, being a devout bro-coder, sent home his lady friends and searched for me. It wasn't for another three hours, god knows how many wrong turns and backward steps later, I was at the Hostel. Where James was waiting with stories and a joint. These were good blokes and sometime over the next week we went shopping, ate dinner, discussed religion (Biff's arab so we had no choice), played music, sourced treats, lost treats, talked shit, toured London, sank piss, smoked, talked shit, monged out and basically lived with each other. For several days there was Danny "Ohh Danny Boy" Hardisty who was a kind of our own Boat That Rocked's "Midnight Mark" - very quiet, very smooth and very very effective. Our time together though, was coming to an end. At least for a bit.

We organised to meet sometime again, somewhere along their path and said our hungover farewells. They were on their way to France and I was supposed to be getting to the real world sometime soon. Rest assured the next entry will detail our next encounter, in Barcelona, no less, and perhaps some of the rare down time.

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